bodies

Many of my friends have extraordinary bodies.

As a dancer, many of my friends are elegantly muscled and finely detailed. Slim. Taut. Prominent are their ledges of bone, their planes of muscle, their particular and striated curves. They are rarely heavy and never what a sensible person might call fat. They are, without exception, beautiful.

Nalo Hopkinson is a writer. She is a hefty, sturdy woman with wild hair. When I met her, she was teaching my class at Clarion. She was standing in front of a classroom, or sitting at a desk, or walking sedately across a university campus, but it was still so obvious that she possessed an impressive physical spaciousness and an unusual combination of ebullience and gravitas that should drive any dancer to envy. Her body has the gift of bending space toward it when she moves, of being so interesting that she becomes a ravishing pool of motion that eyes continuously slide back to.

Some months ago, I read Nalo's blog post about a dance piece she performed in 1998. She writes about the experience of performing from a body that does not fall in the typical aesthetic range of Western theatrical dance and posts an article from the Toronto Star.

And, for some reason, it just smacked me between the eyes. The physical allocation of beauty plucks at us every day (of course it does). We try so hard to be beautiful, and we try so hard to know what is beautiful so that we can have it. And the funny thing is that, in the middle of trying so hard and wanting so much, we so often forget the substance of the thing that we're looking for.

Two things:

The only time I've seen the Mark Morris Dance Company perform live, Mark Morris himself danced a solo. His curly hair hung past his shoulders. He wore a bright red dress and sensible heels. He was rounded, puffy in the chest. When he moved, he was one of the most beautiful people that my 14-year-old self had ever seen. Glorious. Lovable. He was light, swift, sad. He rode the music and chased it down and was actually funny.

My first thought, upon seeing Jacques Poulin-Denis, was that he was very beautiful. He had a delicate bluntness to his dancing, an efficiency that struck me as truthfulness or daring. He was wearing a t-shirt that was faded and sweated through and long pants that crumpled over the tops of his feet, and it took me a while to observe that his right foot was a smooth beige that didn't bend or attempt to match the other side. And then he took it off. He took off his foot and proceeded to be one of the only dancers who has ever made me actually cry because his dancing was exactly what I needed to see.

careless

My friend, Maya Hey, recently posted this video on Facebook. It had been a couple of years since I last saw it, and the sheer bombastic intensity of it surprised me. "Careless" was choreographed by Alex Ketley and premiered in 2006.

Alex challenged all these thoughts I had about being a "good" dancer, about being beautiful and being honest. The girls I danced with were maddening and wonderful, willing to crash into the air and through the floor and run full tilt at one another in the assumption that the collision would be worth it. It was a frustrating and exhausting project, but it shifted my ideals and virtues. Looking at it, I barely recognize those wild girls, newly let loose in unfamiliar movement, but I can appreciate now (and I didn't then; I was so stubborn!) how much being in this piece changed me as a dancer. It cracked open doors in my head in walls that I didn't even know were there.

I think it's also one of my favorite pieces that I've performed. Hurtling through ten minutes of extremely driven, violent movement, I felt like I was falling to pieces and exploding at the same time.
-------------------------------------->
 Some of those girls I haven't seen in a very long time; at least one of them I'll never see again. It's funny (in the odd, melancholy, slightly discomfiting sense) to think about how, sometimes, the people who keep you company while your life becomes entirely different exit or fade away.

spaces for dancing

The piece we're performing tomorrow (tomorrow! OH MY GOD.) has a really beautiful set. The stage, which is unusually deep, is divided into four rooms, each one containing a rectangular slab of white floor. The exterior borders are defined by tall panels of milky, translucent paper, and the interior ones by scrim fabric that turns green and blue and transparent under the lights.

Our tech rehearsal was an epic ordeal. For a 45-minute piece, our crew has to deal with at least 40-something lighting cues. The lights guide the audience's attention, change the pace, intensity, and flavor of the environment, and hopefully make us more beautiful than we deserve.

The audience is meant to walk between the rooms of the stage, making the choice to look at one thing or another. It should be interesting. It's both an extremely formal, artificial construct and a more casual experience than most performances that involve a proscenium stage. There will be wine and the element of chance. We're wearing white silk dresses splattered with grey and little ankle socks. We dance to stories about resolutions, sex, regret, women who turn into trees, women who turn into stone, carrying coal to Newcastle, boardgames, and petting cats. We have a crackling, insidious score.

I am so curious to know what this piece says to people. I'm not sure what it's saying myself. There's a lot of pretty movement, an interesting conceit, an appealing landscape, but what am I trying to say? I'm not sure...

dancing sexy

I rarely feel sexy when dancing.

I think this is a function of the supreme introspection required by practice.

I feel abandon, intellect, passion, frustration, and that particularly satisfying high that comes from dragging something from the cloudy, foggy, slippery cavities of my head to the hard and sharp counters of existence. But rarely, hardly ever that cranked up blast of invitation that focuses all efforts to a blazing spotlight turned on someone else.

Which is just funny to consider when thinking about all the things that I mean to say, but don't, and all the things I don't mean to say, but do.

For instance:
Yesterday, we danced some phrases while our actress read "This Condition" by Lydia Davis. "This Condition" is a story entirely contained in one extremely long sentence. It's a list of things, mostly mundane, and if taken bit by bit, they are not particularly sexy. But when they're allowed to collect, they become (like magic) strangely, outrageously, and hilariously so. They become the kind of story that might be uncomfortable for reading aloud. You are unavoidably talking about sex, even though you're really talking about hands searching in purses, things shaped like Florida, and snails. Dancing to it, you're inevitably reflecting the words, even if you're thinking about something else. Reaching up and touching an ear lobe, or pressing a finger against a nose suddenly says one thing instead of another.

Even if I dance exactly the same way that I would to a piece of classical music, anyone who is watching is going to fill it in with something else.

wrong shoes

There's this really weird feeling that I get when I learn choreography that was created on someone with a completely different habit of moving. It's like I'm trying to fit myself into someone else's skin, and it's all tight in the strangest places, and has residual demands for nuances I would never notice, choices I would never make. Dragging and getting dragged at the same time. Everything feels like it's the wrong size.

And then it's all subsumed by familiarity. Practice sands it down to fit onto my body, to indulge all my habits, tics, and velocities; and it feels so much less like I've got my shirt on the wrong way and my shoes on the wrong feet.

dance + words

Alex offered an interesting task today: take a phrase of movement and put words to it. The goal was to speak clearly and in a relatively natural rhythm, without the stilted chanting that's so often the first tendency when your brain is trying to put together a sequence of words and a sequence of steps. The words could be simple, abstract even, but they had to illuminate a shifting, double idea of intimacy: intimacy with the "audience" and intimacy with someone else.

The movement was simple, mostly gestural and pared down, and we had about half an hour to work; but it was fascinating how difficult it was. The words and the steps jostled each other in my head. I'd have hold of one, and then have hold of the other, and when I tried to put them together, I felt like I had to decide whether to snap my words to the shiny apex of a movement (and skirt close to the chanting monotone) or drop them in the spaces between (where the danger of mealy-mouthed hastiness lurks). Then there's the inherent emotion that seeps from a moving body, which tips the slightest verbal melodrama into embarrassing sentimentality. It's like a double-sided magnifying glass.

The words I made up:

Think of me like the haberdasher considers his wares.

Magnify the particular --

white collars, hats, and pins --

Like that glass you keep forgetting on the table.

Point of view is what makes the illusion work.

Your silk handkerchief.

My black hat.

Sim sim salabim.

Smoke and mirrors shoot you in the heart.

Seams and cracks; you're standing too close, but
Carry on! Don't look

There.

You might miss the trick.

Or see something else, entirely.
***

When I remember sequences of motion, I have landmarks, small pieces and moments, that I rely on because the momentum and connections are logical and inevitable. I can say, my arms are here and then my leg does this and I don't have to consciously remember the thousands of minute manipulations that get me from one to another because it somehow makes sense.

When I remember sequences of words, or am making up sequences of words, I feel like I have to hold onto every single fragment, right down to the tiny prepositions and tense agreements, because words are so precise. They can stand for vast, messy things, but the words themselves are really still in a way. They're partially symbols for what they mean.

Remembering both together made me feel like these languages, dance and English, which I've been speaking for most of my life, were suddenly unfamiliar. It was bizarre and I felt full of prickles (the good kind, the kind that set my brain twirling and make me smile because the day is suddenly more interesting than I deserve).

don't be a wallflower

I have many friends who dance at the drop of the hat. They dance in clubs and at parties; they skip and hop in the street; they bobble their heads and slide their heels to a rocking tune in the aisles of a grocery store. They dance because that is what they do. If you said, "Quick! Tell me something!" they would probably move before they managed to organize a word for their lips.

I have some friends who don't dance. Dance is an alien planet. Dance is something watched from afar, like the inexplicable behavior of some exotic creature revealed to the world only through meticulously edited nature documentaries.

I once had a friend (one from the second camp) tell me that the most frightening thing about dancing was the way you couldn't not be yourself while doing it. No fading behind shyness. It strips you of all the usual techniques that are so useful in deflecting attention from the things you want nobody to see.

That's the point, really. It's hard to remember sometimes, when you go into a studio and consciously make dance, but I think it's sobering, in a good way.

indecipherable

Today, I went to a workshop where we attempted to align ourselves with another person's center (not their geographical center, not their center of gravity; the center we were looking for was an invisible line of something running up through their feet, piercing a certain point behind their breastbone, and escaping through the top of their head). This was a preparatory exercise for improvisation. It was supposed to open us up to the listening required.

My partner stood in front of me and shuffled his feet around. He swayed a bit, staring into my eyes and concentrating hard on something else. Eventually, he stopped. "Is that it?" he asked. "I think I got it. Do you feel that? I definitely feel something."

We were standing about a foot apart. Just standing. I didn't feel anything, except faintly ridiculous. I didn't want to sound like a skeptic, so I asked him what it felt like.

"Kind of a tingling. Like I know we're connected. You know, it's just this feeling."

I tried. I stopped raising my eyebrows. I stood up straight. I tried to imagine tightrope walkers, Siamese twins, kung fu masters. I tried to imagine that this guy, who I had never met before, was (for these five minutes) the only person who mattered in the world. I tried to make my mind a blank.

"Can I be honest?" I said.

"Oh yeah," he said.

"I don't feel anything. Sorry. I really don't." He looked disappointed, and rather sorry for me, as if he had been afraid that I wasn't ready for this, but had been willing to reserve doubt.

"Well, you know, I thought you were pretty hard to read," he said. "Some people just are."

Thanks.

When I look at the back of your neck,
the part just above the fold of collar,
I want to curl my hand against your skin
and press.

Ignore the tiny pinnacles,
the short-lived hairs and slept-in
wrinkles, and plunge straight through
the narrow warmth
that keeps you from the world.

***
Today I am a lump.
Well, aside from the dance class and the filing of taxes and the sorting of several pounds of magazines that collected on my bedroom shelf. Other than that: a lump!

Am reading Theft by Peter Carey. It's good. A fast read because I'm lapping it up, entirely enchanted, disgusted, saddened, and delighted by the voices inside.

Trying to figure out some things about dancing. I've been struggling a bit with some technical things that slipped while my attention was elsewhere. In class today, Summer talked about narrowing the margin of error so that even when you're doing badly, you're still functioning at a certain level. My margin of error right now feels so vast that veering from one end to the other is disconcerting. At the same time, I've been trying to mess up my dancing more. To wake up, be more human and textured and pungent. I feel like I've been smoothing things down, giving them polish, instead of sloughing them off, ripping them, digging inside and taking them out. I want to be messy and real; I want to be fluent and perfect. It's frustrating.

It's how I feel about everything right now, though it's more focussed when I'm dancing. Maybe it's the change in seasons. It's getting to be spring and I want to emerge.

dancey-pants

Am back from seeing my awesome sister tear up the stage as both an extravagantly fierce ballet dancer and a femme fatale from some dramatic noir film. She was amazing.

I haven't danced for two days, so now I feel like my muscles are thrumming with unused excitement. I bounced around to music for a while, annoying my dog who was trying to sleep, but am still on the edge of giddiness. Must now go find something boring to do so I can get some sleep.

a very strange experience

Is what I think watching yourself dance on video is. No matter how fantastic something feels while you're doing it, on the flat, glowing screen it always looks less: less interesting, less beautiful, less weighty, less personable. And sometimes, when something feels really, really, incredibly dreadful, you can't even remember why when you watch it later.

A manila envelope showed up in the mailbox yesterday with a dvd of a project I did the summer before last. It was a difficult project. The concept was interesting: a composer took phrases created by a choreographer and arranged them. He composed the dance and the music, and made a video projection to accompany both. It was an incredible exercise in structure. However, it was also really, really hard, mostly because we rehearsed at the end of days when we had already been dancing for six hours. I was always exhausted, or grumpy, or sore, or famished. I was generally not happy. I felt like a scarecrow rattling around to the music. I was absolutely certain that I looked awful.

Watching the video, I can't pick out now what felt so uncomfortable. It looks fine... and this almost irritates me because I felt so intensely awkward. Apparently, my judgement is not to be trusted. Either that, or everything gets ironed flat on film.

sticking points

Worked on some of those small, worrying details that pluck at me while I'm dancing and go, "right, you're really not capable here, but I guess you can just skate over the whole issue and pretend like you didn't notice." My upper back, the bit underneath the shoulder blades, isn't particularly articulate or clever. It moves in a solid, lumpy block until I'm really warmed up, and then class is almost over and there's not much to do about it.

Anyway, stood in the studio for a good twenty minutes with a glazed look on my face, contemplating the space underneath my shoulder blades and making odd shrugging movements and twitches.

Sometimes, I think about the things that I think about while I'm dancing and it all seems so bizarre. The way the front of my shoulders rotate in their sockets. The distribution of weight between first toe and last. Those little muscles that run in between my ribs. It's like someone standing very close to a painting and trying to decide exactly what color the shadow between two cobblestones should be.
***
Am reading Angela Carter's Nights At The Circus. I'm about half-way through and it's a very strange, very beautiful and twisty, piece of enthusiastic cabaret. Am also reading A Little History of the World by E. H. Gombrich, which is like history told in bedtime stories.

trompe l'oeil, butoh, and the similarities between oysters and stories

I'm reading, in bits and pieces, a collection of Rudyard Kipling's short stories as chosen and arranged by W. Somerset Maugham. The story that I'm reading right now is called "The Village That Voted The Earth Was Flat," which is an irresistible title, but so far seems to be a strange story about a wild bunch of newspaper men who are out to discredit an irritating M.P.

Maugham says something very likeable in his introductory essay though. "No one," he says,
is obliged to read stories, and if you don't like them unless there is something in them more than a story, there is nothing to do about it. You may not like oysters, no one can blame you for that, but it is unreasonable to condemn them because they don't possess the emotional quality of a beefsteak and kidney pudding. It is equally unreasonable to find fault with a story because it is only a story."

Tomorrow, well, later today actually, I'm doing a second workshop with Shinichi Iova-Koga. He is teaching us about butoh. Last time, my understanding was that butoh is a dance that is motivated from the interior, ideas bleeding out gradually to the outer layer of your skin, where they become visible to anyone who is watching... but I think that the definition of butoh is a bit liquid, and I'm sure it'll mean something else today.

I may not know what butoh is, but my neck muscles are very sore from it. Mainly from trying to not use my muscles, which my body apparently interpreted as hauling itself upright by the neck.

And I have discovered a new favorite artist. I have a postcard that my friend sent from Belgium many months ago up next to my desk because it has a pair of boots with water fountaining up from them, and it only occurred to me tonight to look up the artist responsible for the mind prickling image. His name is Roman Signer and he does many extraordinary things, often involving explosions. There is a video of his work, "Action With Sheets of Paper," here, but I like the still photograph because it looks like a grove of white trees with people wandering between them, and it's only when you look closely that you realise it's a shower of white paper falling on a crowd.

dancing shoes

Am just back from dancing. From an evening of swing dancing with the ever lovely Emily at Forrester's Hall in Redwood City.

I've never done swing dancing before. I've never really done any proper social dancing at all, except for a very little bit of salsa, and then the usual bopping around to loud music in clubs or at parties, which I'm not sure counts as "social dancing". I spent most of the evening staring down at my partners' feet, trying to figure out what was going on. Even so, the dancing was marvelous, exhilarating, and an utter delight. It felt wonderful and strange to be surrounded by so many people who were dancing because there was nothing else they would rather be doing. Sheer fun and delight. Everyone was so friendly. A very kind man named Adam, who is one of those dancers who move so smoothly and casually that you can't help but imagine that he moves under a perpetual summer breeze, taught me one of the basic steps. Someone else taught me part of the Charleston, and someone else showed me how to do triple steps. Most of the time, I just whirled and slid around, and laughed my head off because I was having such a good time.

Am also now inspired to write something about those twelve dancing princesses and their worn out dancing slippers, and about how it feels to dance the night away. Lauren suggested it, and the more I think about, the more I wonder...